I was in the supermarket the other day having been sent there for sushi by my six-year old when, not for the first time, I was amazed by the sheer variety of magazines on display. One that jumped out at me was Total Carp – that’s not a misspelling; it’s apparently “The UK’s Biggest Selling Carp Magazine”. It looked familiar. I am sure Total Carp has been around since I first realised I had no interest in carp. My children use the phrase euphemistically i.e. “that’s total carp” to mean something else of course, and to annoy their Mother.

There are people who only fish for carp. No other fish. They do not want a broad-based fishing magazine. They want one on carp.

This is a dream for marketers. Because the greater precision with which you can define your target market, the more precisely you can meet their needs. And you know what they say – “the easiest way to get rich is to find out what people want, and give it to them.”

People have always had niche interests. But the ability to identify these niches and fulfil their immediate needs and wants, and ones they never knew they had, drives demand. It creates demand.

The critical tool for a lot of this niche identification and exploitation (that’s not a bad word…people are not forced to buy Total Carp) is the internet. On the internet, people tell you what they need. They put it into Google. And Yahoo and Bing.

What this means is you can access the long tail – the part of the curve that represents wants and needs that relatively few people have. The key word is relatively. I’ll take as my market 0.01% of the English speaking world any day.

These niches, or non-mass market, were too difficult to get to with any scale in the old days when marketing was expensive – adverts, direct mail etc, etc. Now that marketing is cheap, you can measure your return-on-investment quickly and accurately. Once you identify a niche, you have a real opportunity.

You don’t have to go head-to-head with International Megacorp in the mass market – you can get to the places that International Megacorp cannot get to, because they need markets of a minimum sizes to justify their expensive entry strategies.

You can avoid the mass markets. In fact, you should avoid the mass markets.

Type Google keywords tool into Google, click on the top link, and have a play. If your passion is cocker spaniel grooming you can see how many people are searching for this (today, the stats are 1,000 per month in the UK and 6,600 per month globally). Now I dare say no one is going to travel much more than 20 miles to get their cocker spaniel groomed at your fancy salon. So, for those that are further away, maybe you can offer something of value. A guide; a book; a video; a newsletter. Whatever cocker spaniel owners want – if this is your thing you probably know. Or you could do some market research. Reach out to them. Give them some real value, for free. Start a relationship. There’s 80,000 of them declaring their interest per year. And that’s just for cocker spaniel grooming. Never mind training, breeding, showing, food supplements….

Maybe in time you will have the biggest cocker spaniel-related mail order business on earth. Why not? Someone has to do it. 80,000 people are looking for you to make the move. And then there’s borzoi, afghan, pug…

You can find out what these people want and you can give it to them and they will make you rich. They say money isn’t everything, but as Sophie Tucker said “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Believe me, honey, rich is better.” If you don’t like the word rich, try replacing it with free to do as I choose with my time. How does that sound?

Tweet

This week’s Pearls of Leadership Wisdom is on Marketing.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” – Albert Einstein.

Small businesses do marketing poorly. It’s one of the main reasons they’re small businesses.

Here’s a thought experiment –

In 2009 you had 20 customers (or 50, or 400, it doesn’t matter). Your marketing was ad hoc. You had no real marketing strategy. You did a lot of networking. Your market share is less than 10%.

In 2010, you decide to:

1. Develop and hone your products and services until they are so shiny you can see yourself in them. You do the same marketing as you did in 2009. How many customers do you have?

Well, I think you will get an incremental increase in your customer numbers. All you have really done is increase your conversion rate of prospects into customers. Everything else is the same. So let’s say you will end up with 25 customers in 2010. A 25% increase. Not bad. Not bad.

Or…

2. You do NOT develop your products and services further. Your products and services are good enough (after all, you have the customers you have). Instead, you spend your time in 2010 constructing and executing a targeted marketing strategy to get to more of the kinds of prospects you know you can convert into customers because you did it in 2009. How many customers do you have?

Well, once you have identified your target market, clarified your value proposition and why you’re different, and you have decided it might be good to actually tell as many members of your target market what your value and difference actually is (because you’ve given up being bashful for lent), I think you can readily expect to get your message to twice as many people, generating twice as many prospects, and, as your products and services are unchanged, convert them at the same rate as in 2009 to get 40 customers.

You’ve just doubled your business.

Hurrah!

Reasons why marketing will not double your business –

• You have a huge market share and there’s nowhere to go (and you’re bored with your exec lifestyle and read these Pearls because you like to reminisce about the way it was before you did marketing.)
• You do nothing because you have a lifestyle business and you don’t want to grow. (This is the only good reason.)
• You are cynical and jaundiced about marketing, have spent money before to no end and are once bitten twice shy. (And don’t understand what conditioning means).
• Marketing doesn’t work for you (your current customers bought from you by accident.)
• You are your business and people buy you. Yup. (God was having a laugh when he endowed you with such talents but decided you could only ever show them to a handful of customers. You must have done something bad in a previous life.)

Reasons why marketing will double your business –

• You realise that tinkering with product and service development is something you do because it is comfortable, not because it is right.

• You may not know how to put a coherent, low-cost marketing programme together, but you are not deterred – you get some help, like the big guys do. And you are a demanding outsourcer.

• You do what is right, not what you know.

• You have a passion for your value and to not deliver it to those who would want it if only they knew of you is a crying shame and a crime against humanity. (I only half jest about the crime against humanity bit – if you are helping seriously disadvantaged kids, for example, and you have a proven benefit, and you don’t take the steps you need to get that help to as many as possible, what would you call that?)

Double or quits…

Marketing, to me, is about getting more customers. If you have 20, you can get 40. Incremental change shows poverty of ambition and bank balance.

This is the case for marketing. I rest my case.

Mark

This week’s Pearl of Leadership Wisdom is on…

Process

You don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of achieving anything in any organisation unless you have systematised everything you can.

When I was a young boy…

…I travelled across the Pennines to work in north Manchester at ICI, Purchasing and Supply. My first commercial job. This department was ISO registered. There was a procedure for everything. I didn’t know the first thing about purchasing and I wasn’t going to ask anyone. Oh no! Not me.

I worked every day and then, in the evening, when everyone had gone home, I read the procedures – 2 hrs a night. After 2 months, I knew how purchasing and supply worked. It did nothing for my negotiating skills, or commercial brain. But that’s not what procedures are for.

It takes two…

The skills part lies parallel to the procedure. One is not a substitute for the other.

Without skills, flexibility, experience and creativity: the procedure is a hollow shell.

Without procedure: skills and experience remain largely untapped.

My background has…

…largely been in manufacturing. It’s highly regulated. We had procedures for most things – manufacturing, health and safety, HR, how to walk to your office with a hot drink…

…except sales and marketing.

Except sales and marketing. Oh yes. Sales people are creative, dynamic. They have the gift of the gab, they are flight of foot. They are supreme; saviours of the business. You cannot tether this sort of mercuric talent with procedures. Procedures are for the little people. The office-bound dullards, with their chit-chat about last night’s telly.

This is, of course, crap!

I have a dirty secret…

It’s staggering that so many sales and marketing people have managed to largely get away with not being proceduralised; not using a systematic process. I was one of them. Here’s a dirty secret – sales and marketing is a process. Sales people and marketing people are not born. You don’t need special talents. You don’t need the gift of the gab unless you’re selling from a market stall. You’re not doing that, are you?

Today’s winners…

…don’t allow the critical functions of sales and marketing to be anarchic. They understand it is one of the business’ core processes; the key word being process.

In marketing…

…they understand their Target Market Segments, their Ideal Customer Profile, and how to get to them. They understand their Value Proposition and their Unique Selling Proposition. And they act accordingly. They don’t spend a penny piece on any form of marketing communications unless the return-on-investment can be rapidly calculated. They do marketing experiments – cheap and quick. If it works; do more. If it doesn’t; stop. It’s a process.

If you run your own business and you do not have systematised marketing (i.e. getting those who are interested in what you do to come to you without you hunting them down, one-by-one; your life will be a misery.)

In sales…

…they know how to prospect (and why); how to sell; how to close; how to deliver; how to resell; how to ask for referrals. And when and why all these things should be done. It is not left to chance. They do them all, all the time. It’s not left to what the sales rep feels like doing today. It’s a process.

Of course skill and flair and all that other stuff are important; and with all else being equal they will win the day. But I’d rather have six solid guys following a process, than six prima-donnas who don’t know what day of the week it is, but they’re great guys you know…customers love ‘em.

Too many people…

…spend most of their time unfocussed, unguided, goalless, on autopilot, distracted, anxious, fearful and doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons at the wrong times. OK I exaggerate a wee bit, but not so much.

They certainly spend most of their time doing the one thing they think is important that they are comfortable doing. This is not enough. It really isn’t enough. It isn’t good enough. Not for their organisation. Not for them.

I have seen the light…

People can achieve great things. They have the potential. Challenge your colleagues, bosses and subordinates to develop processes for what they do. Because it’s the foundation that allows their brilliance to shine every day, not just on the occasional day when the chaos allows it.
Mark

…is the subject of this week’s Pearl of Leadership Wisdom

It ain’t what they call you; it’s what you answer to. – W.C. Fields
It’s been only a few short months since I wrote of Self-Confidence and I’m being asked about it again. Despite us living here in one of the richest countries on earth, with 90% of the world’s population willing to swap places with us at the drop of a hat, this remains a huge issue.
My soufflé won’t rise…
Self-confidence cannot simply be summoned up by your neck-top computer.  Positive thinking only gets you so far. You are unlikely to become the world’s best soufflé chef by thinking about it.
We are all in sales…
You are unlikely to be a confident, self-assured small business person if the only thing you’re good at is your product, what you deliver. Not if you have other responsibilities, like sales and sales and sales.
And did I mention sales.
The Great Barrier Grief…
Without doubt there are blockers to self-confidence –

* All dependencies – whether people, drugs, habits, beliefs (I wish independence for the Scots. Not because I have the idiotic hate-the-English mindset, which I don’t. It’s because being independent will force Scotland to be…well… independent. And shed the little-brother mindset. Then, and only then, can we contemplate self-confidence.)
* All comparisons – of yourself with others (the only comparison worth giving brain-time to is where you are compared to where you want to be).
* Don’t repress your desires, they will never go away. The act of repression implies that you feel the desire is bad and you have it so you are bad etc etc you know the thing – no self-confidence there.

Would the real barrier please stand up…
But the real blocker is poor competence or skill. Self-confidence is an output. It’s not an input. You become self-confident when you purposely set out to become skilled and capable at a task. In time, when you hone your skills, it will come. Sporadic bouts of activity, driven largely out of fear and desperation, like the sales guy who hates making calls then makes 100 in a day, and then none for the next two weeks – this compounds and ingrains poor self-confidence. Vicious cycle.
You don’t start with…
…self-confidence. You end with self-confidence.
Of course once competent your self-confidence will increase and this will spill over to become part of your demeanour and will make the attainment of self-confidence in other areas of your life easier. Virtuous cycle.
So what to do…
Think of the one area where supreme self-confidence would change your life. I mean really change it. Be specific.
Plan to do this thing – put it in your diary. Make a promise to yourself. Now plan for this event. Once you’ve done it, review how it went. Seek feedback. Now plan again for the next time. Then do it. Then review.
Plan-Do-Review-Plan-Do-Review….they call it continuous improvement.
Take your medicine…
I cannot stress enough that the one great medicine, the cure-all, that almost always works in almost all situations, that makes you feel better mentally and physically, that generates what those that don’t take the medicine call “luck”…is…ACTION.
Just do it. Self-confidence is an output. It will come.

Mark